“It is terrible the way you young people are behaving nowadays,” the Swedish-born lady said. “There is a shocking number of divorces.”
It is because it was almost impossible to get a divorce before 1956. Husbands and wives who were destroying each other could not get divorced, and could not even separate because they couldn’t find other rooms or flats to go to. They still can’t, someone said.
“I know cases where couples have ‘separated’ and have had to bring their new partners to live in the same tiny flat and no one knew whose children were whose,” said someone else.
There was a quiet, poorly dressed woman of about thirty-five, a clerk in some municipal office. She had divorced her husband after waiting years for the change in the law.
“To live in Budapest,” she said, “both husband and wife must have jobs, because salaries are low, but if the marriage is a bad one and gets on their nerves the news soon gets round, and there are dozens watching them to take their places if their work falls off or they make a mistake. You just can’t afford, for your job’s sake, to have a bad home life.”
“We can hardly ever meet, or we’re tired out when we do,” said a young man, talking of his girl. “We both have to have two jobs.”
“Yet,” said the tough old Swedish lady, “you’ve got to admit that women have a much better status, they are much more highly regarded by their neighbours and friends in this society, if they do work.”
They all agreed on that. There was a rosy-faced, white-haired, very stout, energetic woman, excitable, clever and talkative, who was wearing a brilliant red dress. She was a Greek scholar and when she left with us and we took a fast trolley bus which rolled and swayed us all as we drove into Buda, she was laughing about what she was going to cook for her family’s supper. She not only taught in the university, but she supported and looked after her family and nursed her husband who was crippled and whose health had been wrecked by years in concentration camps. She was the jolliest woman I met in Hungary and, as some said, “one of the old Communist idealists—not one of the time-servers of today.” Where does one not hear nowadays, East or West, that the young generation are time-servers and operators?
Traditionally Budapest was the gay city. One very old gentleman told me that the gaiety of the old days had vanished. I found him living in a rather impressive suburban house among his books and pictures, sitting morosely at a handsome table covered with drawings and eating corn on the cob, a rather buttery dish for a very old gentleman. He was cursing old age eloquently, appeared several times to nod off, spoke to me in several languages and talked about the universal Hungarian subject—Shakespeare. He saw himself as Lear and was enjoying the part, as he peered at his circle of admirers. Age and eminence are treated with profound respect in this country.
Despite the old man’s anger against time, I found pockets of gaiety in Budapest. That very evening up in the hills from which Buda looks like a field of stars fallen to earth some of us went to eat delicious pork cooked on a skewer and to drink white wine at a small tavern. Two or three parties had brought accordions to their tables, everyone was drunk and singing; carnations were being thrown at the pretty girls and there was general uproar. The music echoed off the suburban woods and hills.
And then, in other places, there were the gypsy orchestras. We were sitting in the courtyard under the trees of a modest café in Buda, where a few couples were drinking the delicate white wine. Painters, Hollywood films and smart restaurants generally romanticise the gypsy. In Hungary, which is, above all others, the country of gypsy music, the gypsy is a respectable-looking man in a navy-blue serge suit. Certainly he is swarthy and dark-haired; one notices also two main types, the plump, short kind with congested face, who looks like a prosperous lawyer, and the lean, emaciated, thin-lipped kind, who looks like the devil. The unsmiling face, the indifferent manner, the impassivity with which they receive praise, insult or endure scornful neglect, their concern only for money and their amused ironical refusal to thank if they get it, are the qualities which give them a frightening distinction.
They know they are able to create feeling in their audience and to play with detached cruelty upon them until one is, for the moment, in their impudent and yet negligent power. There are bad gypsy players in Budapest, but the good ones know how slowly to fill every molecule of the air with their smoky, sullen chords that rumble like fire shut up in a furnace, a sound that slurs and slumps, breaks off and picks up again with wicked suddenness and passes to the tricky clipping of the strings, rises to ferocity, then clouds and falls away into a blank carnal sadness. It is the music of the sexual act.
Hungarians are more critical of the facility of the music than we are. I heard of one old man who refused to pay any orchestra unless they made him cry. He was experienced and resistant. He was angry if he beat them. But if they forced tears out of him he paid them highly. They make a point of playing to lovers and, of course, come close enough to play pretty well under a girl’s chin. The fiddler in one garden café set out to hypnotise a girl who was quarrelling with her young man. He put every trick he knew into his playing, and the orchestra played with its thunders and insinuations at the other end of the garden, backing him up but never looking at him. But, in the end, the girl and the young man simply ignored him and without a sign on his face he went away. The performance had taken twenty minutes.
There was a tale going round Budapest when I was there that a Hungarian had volunteered to go by sputnik to the moon. When he was asked why he wanted to go to the moon he said that he didn’t want to, but that he had put in his application because he thought it might be a way of getting a sight of Vienna on the way. Hungarians crave to go to Vienna. It is very difficult to go. They would like to go to the Adriatic, but that is next to impossible: Yugoslavia is deviationist. Some do make the long journey across Romania and Bulgaria to the Black Sea. Hungary is lucky in Lake Balaton and it shares the Neusiedler See with Austria.
Lake Balaton is one of the largest lakes in Europe ; it reminds one of Lake Leman at Geneva, and tens of thousands go there for their holidays in the summer. The vines grow on the hills along the lake; the villas, the hotels, the Trades Union hostels, on the south side, the pleasant, very southern style towns—almost Provençal— make it a delightful little Riviera. Hundreds of white sails slope in the regattas, the white lake steamers ply up and down on the blue water and hoot to get the famous echo off the hills. When they hear the echo all Hungarians are supposed to recite some lines of a famous patriotic poem which mean “Don’t leave your native land; it is a good place to live and die in.”
I went out to Balaton by train which takes about two hours. Like most train journeys in Hungary, this was a ride through flat, irrigated country, a graceful mixture of meadow, marsh, scrub and cornland. The maize was ripening. Miles and miles of sunflowers were drooping, their seeds almost ready to be collected for the making of sunflower oil. (It is a cooking oil and I think there is a lot to be said for the Hungarian belief that it is better than olive oil.) The heavy, narrow, horse-drawn carts were going down the dusty roads; now and then, one saw a man stripped to the waist and cutting corn with a scythe and women crossing the fields with mattocks on their shoulders. Tractors and combines are not very commonly seen, except in the collective farms. Along the grassy banks the godetia was growing, larger and pinker than I have ever seen in northern Europe.
The villages were scattered collections of red boxes and occasionally, in a poor village, they were still thatching the roofs with rushes. There were long stretches where stooks of dark rushes were drying in the fields; for a moment, one mistakes them for stooks of very dark corn. Rushes are excellent insulators; in one of the Balaton villages I saw a very large hut of rushes like a beehive; it was the communal refrigerator. Food can be kept cold or frozen in these simple mounds for months on end. The vines growing in the red soil by the lake looked in excellent order and already, in some, the grapes were gathered and the rejoicings, the music, the d
ancing had begun. The rocky peninsulas going out into the Lake were almost Mediterranean; the poplar trees were grouped exactly to suggest the cypress of the south; the older houses in the towns were deep-walled.
I travelled with a cheerful, hustling collection of well-dressed men and women who were going to a week-end bridge tournament—bridge is still a strong Hungarian taste—but my own companion was an energetic and exalted young man whose interests were gypsies and painting. He had worked for a dance band in the difficult times; he was interesting because he had been brought up as a Protestant. Nearly thirty per cent of Hungarians belong to the Lutheran Church and they have been noted, as a sect, for producing outstanding figures.
There is an interesting colony of painters in Balaton. I did not see any examples of Socialist Realism in their work. They are a hospitable lot and one or two have lovely old houses in which one finds the high green or brown or white and gold tiled stoves, as monumental as shrines, in the corner of the room. Out come the little cups of coffee the moment the visitor arrives. Later, the white wine and delicious little things to eat. I always find painters better company than writers; they have more curiosity and observe more things. These painters did not complain of anything much, except that they were starved of Paris. The real difficulty for the State is that it accumulates large quantities of paintings which it does not know what to do with. Like the Poles, the Hungarian painters are being tactfully diverted towards handicrafts, folk arts and decorative work, and with some deplorable success.
I stayed in a hillside village on Balaton. It was a hot little place of rocky paths and lanes ankle deep in dust and loose stone, with pigs and pullets scampering about and geese on the march. The gardens were full of showy dahlias. There were strong girls at the wash-tubs or at the wells. I stayed in a little bungalow owned by a kindly widow, and slept in a bedroom that contained the usual wedding photographs and religious lithograph over the bedhead. Someone in the house was a great reader of paperbacks.
My friend and I ate our dinner of roast pork and sauerkraut very late that night at a labourer’s tavern which had its own gypsy in attendance. He played on the rough terrace where we were eating and the labourers shouted compliments and insults to him as he played. He had a cigarette in his stained fingers all the time as he played and he took no notice of what was said. Someone brought him a drink afterwards. He merely nodded. He was a thin, poor, nervous gypsy with bloodshot eyes who lived in the village and was pitied because he had been the victim of a loose-living wife who had caused him trouble.
That night when I groped my way over the stones and boulders in the dark to the bungalow I was alarmed to be barked at and followed around by twenty or thirty excited dogs who rushed out of the shadows. They had been on the chain all day: the villagers turn them out at night to fight and work off their energy. All night long they squabbled and barked at the moon.
Back in Budapest, I found I had to fly south again to Pecs. I wanted to see an industrial town and Pecs has coalmines and—not far off—are the uranium mines. The uranium—to the annoyance of Hungarians—goes to Russia. A wild Hungarian horse fair takes place every year near Pecs, but I missed it. The little Malev planes— Malev is the State Airline—can take about ten passengers, but there were only an engineer and a couple of peasants on the flight with me. We fluttered along until we got to the densely wooded hills and saw the sad, wide Danube sketching its way up to the hazy skyline in long bends towards Belgrade.
The Turks got to Pecs and there is a mosque—now an ornate Catholic church in the main square. There is also a pretty little minaret standing in the backyard of a brewery. The town is old, very busy, very noisy and pretty. It has a university and it is famous for its ceramics. An automatic harmonium playing Come Back to Sorrento and O Sole Mio with the pedal down spread its treacly sounds from an empty café under the trees in the main square. For the rest, Pecs is an old steep place of little shops and little one-storey houses, like a town in the south of Spain. There are old ladies and girls at the windows, the sewing-machines are going (these sewing-rooms are unsocialised): the tailors sit on their tables, the little cafés fill up when the workers swarm in by bus in the evenings, and the hairdressers work late. There were stacks of black water melons like cannonballs in the streets. An opera company had lately performed Otello in the town.
I watched the newspaper seller standing in the rush hour in the main square, with stacks of the evening paper, but I saw no one buy one from him. The Hungarians are avid and instructed readers and are terribly bored by their official press. The only papers they like are the picture papers and the literary weeklies. The industrial part of Pecs is a couple of miles away. The workers are very well housed. The lack of coal in Hungary has been a national problem for generations and there is no doubt about it that the State looks after the miners, who may not be highly paid but do better than other workers. The failure in housing elsewhere was a good deal responsible for the anger of the masses in 1956.
I stayed in an old-fashioned hotel in Pecs, a place where everything was outsize, from the quantities of indoor plants in the old glass-enclosed corridors to the immense beds, quilts, sofas and wardrobes in the bedroom. I fancy I got the bridal suite, which outdid in Germanic carving anything I have ever seen. The State unloads its oil-paintings on the hotels; my room had four or five very large, violently coloured original paintings: reaping scenes, vineyards and portraits of powerful peasants. The scene in the dining-room in the evening was a replica of what one sees in all the solid provincial hotels in the world. Somebody’s small jazz orchestra played to the melancholy middle-aged men—businessmen, officials, each sitting alone at his table before a carnation in a silver-plated vase. One or two couples danced. Except for the nightly dancing one might have been sitting in Troyes in France or Andover in England. I was with a middle-aged man who had something to do with libraries and who was still sentimental about his days in London before the war. Anyway, we played the game of spotting the Party members and working out their life stories. In these places, he said, it was easy to spot them.
“That young couple over there, dancing very stiffly,” he said. “The young man with the earnest look of a deputy assistant manager in an electric supply company; his wife with glasses, the scrubbed look and her hair as tight as her lips, and the air of an English Sunday School teacher—that is the type. Let us see if they ever smile.”
They did not.
There is no doubt that the general tone of the Party is puritan, priggish, earnest and sentimental. It is always lecturing and rebuking. It sees itself as a genteel and dedicated minority and there is no doubt that in education (for example) they have raised the general standard dramatically, as far as the three Rs and simple technical education are concerned. In other departments education is in a state of political crisis. Children are very well cared for and look healthy. On the whole Europe had always preferred the disciplined child to the child that “expresses” itself. But the Party sees the whole of life as a school and the mass of people hate that.
I was amused by the crowd at the railway station at Pecs. The country people piled into the waiting-hall and camped there with their basketloads of yellow peppers, their bursting bunches of dahlias, their bundles of salami sandwiches, their cakes and their beer, enjoying the heat, the uproar, the mess and the reek of poor humanity. Next door in what is called the Culture Waiting Room, which has a few sad pieces of framed and educative peasant embroidery on the wall, were sitting three middle-aged ladies, spotless, prim, silent—Party members of Victorian respectability, holier than the crowds next door.
Drastic societies like the Communist produce their special kind of corruption. With his carelessness and intelligence, the Hungarian is quick to find ways of getting round the regulations. The traveller’s voucher system in the hotels is easily manipulated. Then it is a country where “influence” and personal arrangements are indispensable. Before 1956 the Government went much too far in forcible collectivation ; they have had to
retreat—for the moment. You can own a house or a flat of not more than six rooms now; and people with large houses can now let them. This is in fact a scandal, for the State took over these large houses, and has now been driven to reselling them—but not to the original owners!
People who are called “class enemies”, and their children, have a bad time. This leads to strong feelings. Miss X, daughter of a class enemy, wishes to follow evening class at the University; the way is barred. She asks Mr. Y, who has the ear of the authority, to wangle permission. In exchange, she uses her influence with the engineers to see that Mr. Y gets that almost impossible thing, a telephone. This particular intrigue took a new turn when I was in Budapest. The postman had intervened and offered to get the telephone order fixed up, for a douceur of a thousand fiorints! I do not say that Hungarians are more corrupt than other people ; they are just easy-going, especially about money. I do say that Communist states are as corrupt as others and that there is more confusion in them and that the corruption exists in the Party. Where did that car come from? How did you get that flat? One of the cleverest and most gossipy populations in the world knows very well.
Many people, indeed most people, deny that Communism has raised the standard of life among the masses, but I do not see how this can be judged. There is a general rise in the standard of living, health and education throughout Europe ; a new class has emerged and dominates: the lower middle class. If they had nationalised the largest industrial concerns, let the farmers and peasants alone, after breaking up large estates, and kept their hands off the shops, the Communist governments would not have a sullen, grudging people on their hands. But Communism has done away with dire poverty. The scandals of Sicily and Calabria have no parallel in the satellite countries. Remove Russian troops and pressure, and the natural liberality of a deeply Western people would once more assert itself ; there seems little hope of that happening.
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